The Creative Scholars Project is a weekly discussion group – hosted by the Creative Mind Initiative and the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts - which examines creativity as it plays out in the teaching and research of faculty and students across academic disciplines at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. These conversations are a critical engagement with our creative processes in our teaching, research, and scholarship. We are interested in promoting interdisciplinary and interinstitutional conversations about what creativity is, how to better foster conditions for promoting it, and how to translate these insights into more effective pedagogies for teaching creative process within our respective disciplines.

The pursuit of creativity can seem baffling. When you ask someone how she manages to “be creative,” you may hear descriptions of everything from an ephemeral burst of inspiration while hiking to a brainstorming meeting in a regulated office context. This isn’t just the fault of our fuzzy language around creativity—even in psychology, creativity is...

Brown is known for its passionate, independent, and socially-minded students—that’s been evident in portrayals of the university everywhere from the nightly news to “The O.C.” (one step onto College Hill and a party girl was transformed into an environmental activist). With all these do-gooders in one place, where does creativity fit in? As it turns...

If globalization is a double-edged sword, photographer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Byers draws his inspiration from the edge opposite our own. The self-described “expedition artist” said in a Creative Mind lecture this evening, “I realized, as a documentarian and as a human, that I was really interested in exploring not the cutting edge of what...

At a recent Creative Scholars meeting, I brought up an article that appeared in the New York Times earlier this month. The article examined the idea of “creativity as academic discipline,” focusing on specific undergraduate and graduate programs that aim to teach creativity. The article was interesting, but the reader comments were what really drew...

Creativity is everywhere in current dialogue – leaders and thinkers across disciplines are calling for greater creativity in education, entrepreneurship, social change, urban planning, and so on. But what does that mean? Creativity is a word that can be difficult to pin down. As new conceptions of innovation shape approaches to higher education, programs and units...